Netsuki
by Tyger and Darkdracofire
Summary: [Major Weird, AU for end of the series.] Grouchy spirits, adaptation and Entrance Exams. Sleep and the lack of it. [Bakurae]


This fic took up all of March, 2005. At least a scene per night.  
I couldn't look at it for quite a while afterwards.  
But it is weird, and I like it. Fanfiction . net has, of course, ruined the formatting, which is also weird, and I don't understand - but it works, for the most part. If you want to see it it's true, rtf, formatted glory, just ask. I'm not hard to get in touch with.

Netsuki

**By Tyger.**

In desperation, he asked the darker half of Yuugi.  
"No, it's too dangerous."  
"_Please_?"  
"Bakura-kun, you could _loose your soul_."  
"I know. But you and Yuugi-kun were all right."  
"We didn't know what we were doing. We were very, very lucky."  
"Maybe I'll be lucky too."  
"Bakura-kun..."  
"_Mou hitori no _Yuugi-kun. Anything will be better than constantly wondering what day it is... whether or not I was just sleeping... why I'm not where I was a moment ago. Anything."  
"But..."  
"Please."  
"All right." Let it never be said that he could not be a manipulative bastard when he so chose.

It was lightning and fire and ice and painpainpain and dark-bright darkness. It was fear and horror and griefandgriefandgrief and liquidfire rage and vengeance. It was everything and nothing and by the gods above why wouldn't it _stop_?

And then it did stop, and they finally faced one another.  
_...he does look different...  
...the HELL?...  
...maybe I should have told him...  
...who had done this? The Puzzle-bound one?  
...no. This is how it should be...  
What was he thinking?  
...he's surprisingly pretty...  
Why would he do such a thing?  
evil and cruel and vicious...  
but still...pretty..._  
And then the pain and exhaustion caught up to them, and they fainted dead away.

He awoke. The darkness tried to keep him - of course it did, he belonged to it, after all - but he eventually managed to open his eyes.  
He didn't know where he was. He knew that he had never been there before. _What_ had the yadonushi been doing again?  
He didn't remember. And then he did.  
He would have sat bolt upright in annoyance, except for the fact that he couldn't. As it was, he barely got his head off the pillow before it fell back down again.  
He glared at the world in general, until the darkness took him again.

He awoke, and he wondered what day it was and whether he had just been sleeping and why he wasn't where he had been a moment ago.  
And whether or not he had succeeded.  
He sat up, though it took a while. His body seemed a little disjointed from his mind. He wondered if it was the pain he felt, or something else.  
Half an hour later, he had managed to dress himself, and had figured out that it was Sunday already. It had been Friday night when he had arrived.  
Slowly, he had it down to the kitchen, usually the centre of the household's activity. And he only nearly fell asleep mid-step twice.  
It appeared to be just before lunch. Mutou-san was cooking, and humming absently while doing so, Yuugi and his other half were chatting at the table, and over in one corner, as far away from the rest of them as he could get whilst still being in the same room, and doing his best to pretend they weren't there, was _him_.  
It took all his self-control to stop himself shouting out in joy.

Mutou-san had insisted on feeding them before they left. They hadn't been hungry, but he had insisted. According to Yuugi, his mother had inherited her ladle-wielding skills from him. They were too exhausted to argue, anyway.  
Yuugi had tried to convince them to stay another night, but neither of them felt comfortable staying there.  
It was a windy grey afternoon outside. Bakura looked at the sky and almost frowned. It would probably rain before he got home. He hated getting wet.  
He had already gone five meters before he realised the other wasn't following. He looked back over his shoulder, to the other frowning off into space. His hair caught in the breeze as he turned his head.  
"You're... welcome to come, if that's what you'd like." And he kept walking.  
It took less than ten seconds for the other to follow.

"Why?" The question came out of nowhere, and perhaps wasn't an appropriate one for walking down the busy street they needed to to get to the train station, given the implied meaning.  
The other just looked at him, exhausted eyes completely serious.  
"Because you're a real person too." It was a crowded street, bustling with life, but all they could hear was the wind in the skyscrapers.

They had managed to beat the real rain home.  
They stood in the entrance hall, only slightly damp, and took off their shoes. Moving in the way only the truly exhausted could, they went straight to bed; one in his usual place, the other in the father's room.  
They didn't speak. They didn't need to.

It wasn't until Tuesday they could stay awake for more than half an hour at a time. Bakura made potato pancakes for lunch. There wasn't much food in the apartment.  
He set a plate of pancakes down in front of the other with a soft clink. He had been sitting, staring off into space and brooding, and hadn't heard him come near him. if the slight jump and twitch of fingers was any indication of his mood.  
"If you're hungry." He said with a small bow of the head. The other frowned at him.  
"I don't need to eat."  
"I know."  
He ate them anyway.

He couldn't sleep.  
His body wasn't screaming out in desperation for it, so he just... didn't. It felt like there was a gaping hole in the place where his soul should be.  
It had been there all day, actually, but it was worse at night. At night, he couldn't ignore it.  
Softly, silently, he began to cry.  
_What have I done?_

He didn't sleep. Not properly, anyway. Not a real, healing sleep. Just enough that his body wouldn't shut down of it's own accord at an inconvenient time, and even then it was fitful.  
And people wondered why he was unbalanced.  
It wasn't so much to do with his trade - though that had taught him to sleep with one eye open at all times - but more to do with the fact that is he wasn't sleeping, he was awake.  
If he was awake, the nightmares couldn't get him.  
If he was awake, he didn't have to remember.

He saw his friends on Friday. Exactly a week later.  
Had it only been a week? It felt like forever.  
Like he'd always had a grouchy solid-spirit in his apartment.  
Like he'd always been cooking for two.  
Like he'd always cried himself to sleep.  
Everyone had been concerned about him; they said he looked too pale, too thin, and that the bags under his eyes didn't look healthy.  
He'd laughed, and said that they didn't look much better. It was the first time he'd laughed in almost as long as he could remember.  
He hadn't visited long. They all knew no-one could afford to take that much time off from studying. The University Entrance Exams were in a month, after all.

He stopped at the convenience store down the street on the way home. There still wasn't much food in the apartment; needing to buy some gave him an excuse to take a break from studying, after all.  
It was cold outside. It rarely snowed in Domino, but it often felt like it would.  
"Tadaima" he called out softly as he entered his apartment. It was an old habit from his childhood he'd never broken. He hadn't expected a response for a long time.  
"Okaerinasai." He almost jumped at the voice, then he smiled.

It was four in the morning, and he wasn't sure whether or not he was dreaming.  
Every single book he owned relatively related to mathematics was spread out over his living area. Even the ones he had from primary school that he had been sure were lost long ago (he never, ever threw out books of any sort, for any reason. There were reasons book doctors existed, after all.). In the middle of it all lay his grouchy roommate. Armed only with the tiny 10 x 15 blackboard he'd had forever and a box of chalk.  
He blinked, and stared. The other looked up at him.  
"I was bored."  
"I... see." And then, quieter. "Can't you sleep?"  
"No." He frowned, sadly.  
"Me neither." He grabbed the book he was reading, and curled up on the couch  
It was a comfortable sort of companionship.

Making sure he wouldn't be seen, he watched the yadonushi. The boy perplexed him. He wasn't like anyone else he had ever met. He was not mad. But he was not sane, either. Sane people did _not_ suddenly burst out into song in bad English, or Korean. Or German. Or stand on their head for no reason at all. Or read upside-down and sideways. Or write with both hands at once. Ot do any number of the things the yadonushi did. And neither did they decide to give a long-dead spirit who has given them nothing but trouble a second chance at life.  
But he was not mad.  
He also watched the yadonushi because the yadonushi was nice to stare at. Which was why he must not be caught.

He studied. He studied and he studied and he studied, until he was so sick of studying that that he threw his pencil at the wall in an uncharacteristic show of temper. It fell to the floor with a clatter.  
He stared at the mark on the wall for some time.  
Eventually, he went and picked up his pencil, but left the mark as it was.  
The other watched, openly amused.

He came out of the Dream fighting.  
His body hadn't been able to take the lack of sleep, and had shut down on him. For this, and this only, he wished he was still incorporeal.  
The yadonushi was watching him with shocked eyes. He must have screamed. The yadonushi was too polite to come into 'his' room otherwise.  
It wasn't long until the Dream's after-effects set in. Three thousand years and more, and he still blubbered like a child over it. He bit his hand so hard it bled. The pain helped, a bit.  
If it hadn't been for the fact that his hand was in his mouth, though, he would have hit the yadonushi when he put his arms around him.  
He took his hand out of his mouth in order to make the yadonushi go away. Some long-forgotten instinct took over halfway, land he clung to him like a child, and sobbed into his shoulder. It was only when he got so close that he realised the yadonushi was crying too.  
This... was better than pain.

He slept in a sunbeam, like a cat. He dozed, still half-aware of his surroundings. The now-familiar grumblemutters of ever more complex maths problems reached his ears; he now had trouble sleeping without it.  
Slowly, he opened one bleary eye. The grumblemutters stopped for a second, and just for a moment, all he could see were piercing red eyes.  
"You look like shit." He gave a sleepy smile, and went back to sleep.

The yadonushi was acting weird. Which should have made him normal, but didn't.  
He wasn't sleeping, and the yadonushi _liked_ sleeping. And even when he dozed, it was on the shiny wood-floor of the working-room, not his bed or even the reed floor. And never, ever at night.  
The yadonushi was becoming scarily like him.  
The yadonushi was sleeping, fitfully. He padded over, soundlessly.  
Almost tentatively (but he was not tentative. Not him), he lay his hand on the yadonushi's arm, intending to - what? He wasn't sure.  
The yadonushi's sleep immediately settled. He stared and frowned, for a while, and then picked up the yadonushi and put him to bed.

He was cooking, sort of. He knew he shouldn't be; he was so tired he couldn't concentrate, but he had to eat. It didn't occur to him to make Chicken Ramen ore some such thing; he was a cook at heart.  
Of course, trying to cook while so tired his vision was periodically fuzzy was an idea doomed to failure from the outset.  
The surprised yell caught the other's attention immediately. He rushed over just in time to catch him when he collapsed from shock.  
It took weeks for the burns to heal, but all he could remember was the feeling of being caught, and he concern in the other's eyes.

He was hot, but he was shivering. His head ached, his mouth was dry, and his stomach was protesting violently at something. What was wrong with him?  
He tried to sit up, only to find he couldn't. He eventually managed to roll over. His hair fell in his face. He coughed, and felt as though he ought to be coughing up blood. He was relieved that when he looked at his hands he found that he wasn't.  
He managed to roll onto all fours, and then stagger to his feet. He _really_ need to pee.  
That being done, he staggered down his hallway to the kitchen. He should probably eat something before studying. Halfway down the corridor, though, he ran into something of a roadblock. He was back in his room by the time he'd realised he'd been unceremoniously slung over the other's shoulder. He blinked.  
"Ku" But the other was already gone.  
He was struggling to his feet again, when he felt a had on his head pushing him down.  
"Sit." A glass was shoved under his nose. Water. "Drink." He drank, but started coughing in the middle of it, and managed to get most of the water everywhere _but_ his stomach. The other rolled his eyes. "Sleep."  
"But -"  
"Sleep."  
"Study -"  
"_Sleep_."  
"The exams -"  
"**Sleep**." He slept.

It was the day of the (first) exam.  
The day of the (first) exam.  
The exam.  
Oh _shit_.  
He raced around the house, somehow managing to cook and eat breakfast, get dressed, and gather his notes (to read on the train) at roughly the same time.  
"Ittekimasu"  
" _Oi._" He was already halfway towards the stairs. He turned on the balls of his feet, nearly falling as he did so.  
The other stared at him, one eyebrow raised. He held his umbrella (it was raining rather heavily out), and the lunch he'd made yesterday. "Itteirasshyai."  
He grabbed the proffered items, and pulled the other into a quick half-hug.  
"Sankyuu! Ittekimasu" And he dashed down the stairs.  
The other stared after him for a long time.

He practically tore the letter apart. The other looked on in amusement. The entrance exam results were in.  
"I got in!" He bounced over to the other, kissed him exuberantly, and then spun him around in a circle. "I got in I got in _I got in_!"  
It was only when he saw the other's shocked face he realised what he'd just done.  
"Erm... I... ah..." He was silenced by the other's lips on his. Red eyes glittered in amusement.  
"Congratulations." The other purred.

He couldn't sleep, even though his body screamed for it. He couldn't sit, he couldn't write, he couldn't draw, he couldn't even stand and stare. Now that he had no study to distract him, the ache of the hole in his soul was getting worse in exponential fashion.  
It was too elemental for something as articulate as tears, or screams, or fits of raving lunacy. Though he knew he got closer and closer to madness everyday.  
He ended up pacing around his room, as if that would somehow give him the answer. He noticed he was dehydrated. He went to get a drink, only to bump into the other halfway down the hall. Literally.  
He looked up at the other, and something finally snapped deep inside of him. He clung to the other and broke down.  
The other held on to him all through the night, and in his arms he finally found peace.

---

寝つき (Netsuki) - the quality (ease, difficulty) of one's sleep. Jim Breen's WWWJDIC

Con-crit, as always, appreciated above anything else. But we won't say no to anything - feedback makes us happy.


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